And then, interestingly, she asked me if I had expected my genetics results to report a sizable Ashkenazi component. I had expected it, I told her, but it turns out, I’m not very much Ashkenazi. Instead, I am unexpectedly Irish. It’s all very mysterious, I confided. And that’s when everything started to get a little weird.

Alice wrote that a few years back she had ordered a genetics test. She had expected the results to report that she was Irish, but instead they uncovered that she was half Ashkenazi Jew. She figured there must have been some mistake, but all of her brothers and sisters received the same results. P, her cousin, however, did not. Alice’s cousin, P, was not Jewish and was in fact not genetically related to Alice at all.